RIP Lil Bub, starcatte extraordinaire
Kat Eschner's newsletter about animal-human relationships, Vol. 4 Iss. 4
This week’s issue of CREATURE FEATURE is brought to you by Cardassian voles. (I’ve been doing a lot of knitting to finish Christmas gifts and have thus also been rewatching a lot of my favorite TV.)
I *love* Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I like the queer representation, the general diversity, the characterization—all of it. (Choosing between Picard, Sisko and Janeway in a game of fuck/marry/kill, I’d definitely marry Sisko.) Another of the things I love is the sheer amount of banal space weirdness, something that’s encapsulated pretty well in the Cardassian vole.
The voles are basically space rats left over by the last people who occupied the space station, the Cardassians. They’re not a *huge* problem, but they’re irritating. Unlike the Tribbles, for instance, they don’t devour essential supplies, and unlike *many other* Star Trek pests, they don’t mess up the ship so much as to potentially destroy it or kill people. They’re just gross and inconvenient and irritating to everybody from Chief of Operations Miles O’Brien to Quark, the Ferengi bar owner.
They’re also some of the fakest-looking, grossest practical effects aliens I’ve ever seen. They’re hilarious. Just LOOK AT THIS CLIP. Long live the horrifying Cardassian vole.
A stunned Cardassian vole. (Screenshot from Memory Alpha)
Extra credit
Newsy stuff I read this week
“Her backstory is that she came from space here to Earth to help us out in a lot of ways, which she has obviously done… I would like to send her back in her spaceship.” Lil Bub’s owner wants to send her ashes into space (Indianapolis Star, Ethan May)
“A breeding kennel has already been set up with ten of the dogs, which are used by the Chukchi people of eastern Siberia for pulling sleds.” Russia drafts Siberian huskies (BBC News)
This one’s part of an ongoing saga that has been weird to watch. You can find links to past reporting at the bottom of this story. Animal abuse is a crime the internet won’t forgive (Pennsylvanian Patriot-News, Charles Thompson)
Seems like it would be a nice place for a walk, but I get it. Mandai wildlife bridge is animals-only (Vanessa Liu, The Straits-Times)
I went into this one rolling my eyes, but the reporting is actually pretty good. Arizona man registers beehive as service animal (azfamily.com, Max Gordin)
Whoaaaa. Researchers develop new software that allows us to see like different kinds of animals. (Popular Mechanics, Jennifer Leman)
Longer/thinkier stuff
KIM POSSUMBLE. Inside a Sonoma County exotic animal shelter (The Press Democrat, Stephen Nett)
I’m just so tired. Nine lambs at the center of a university rights fight*may* already be dead (The Daily Beast, Olivia Messer)
Good question. Why would a whale eat plastic? (National Geographic, Natasha Daly)
Bring me your strange, your transgressive, your progressive takes. Animal are political actors, too (Tenderly, Marina Bolotnikova)
Swans eat tadpoles. A swan will slurp up entire schools of larval amphibians, process them and shit them out, and sometimes then it will sit in the shit or walk through it, and here we are. Anyone who claims that a swan is a majestic and noble creature has never seen a swan up close or smelled its bacterial purge.
—Amelia Gray, “The Swan As a Metaphor for Love”
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All images in CREATURE FEATURE are used under Creative Commons licensing. Efforts have been made to ensure that photographs of living animals or natural scenes have been taken ethically, in responsible pet ownership conditions, at AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums or under safe, non-damaging conditions in the wild. If you see an issue with any image we share, please notify me.